Transform Your Decision Making Process with this 5-Step Approach
A good friend of mine recently offered an interesting perspective from the top of the organization he leads. He remarked that leaders (of any organization, team, community, or family) should expect to continuously have to make complex and ambiguous decisions. After all, if they weren’t complex or ambiguous, they would have been decided at lower levels of authority. That (somewhat obvious) perspective has caused me to embrace the opportunity to make difficult decisions.
Do you find yourself constantly having to make ambiguous and complex decisions?
It’s a sign that you’re a leader.
In my case, we have ambiguous decisions like these at home all the time: Do we pay to proactively remove ice from our roof so it doesn’t create damage (yes, that’s a thing in Minnesota)? Which activities should our kids participate in, and how much participation is too much?
At work, likewise, we’re faced with a steady diet of difficult decisions: Should we continue to fund a project? What roles should we be hiring to manage our growth? Do we invest in this initiative?
All of these decisions are multi-layered, nuanced, and could go either way. Rather than bemoan the complexity or take the easy route of making gut decisions that are prone to cognitive biases, these decisions need to be embraced!
Start by Admitting You Have a Problem
The first step to making complex or ambiguous decisions is to realize that we’re limited in our natural ability to make good decisions. It’s helpful to remember the ancient Indian parable of a group of blind men who meet an elephant for the first time. They each learn and conceptualize what the elephant is like by touching a different part of the body. Later, they each describe an elephant differently based on their limited perspective. The same is true with people facing the same problem.
Furthermore, being wrong is labor intensive. It takes a lot of energy to be curious, consider alternative perspectives, and go beyond your initial conclusions. Therefore, you develop heuristics (mental shortcuts) and cognitive biases (mental assumptions) to make life easier. And, with enough confidence and savvy, you can persuade others that you’re right.
But what if you’re not right?
I remember presiding over a decision that I was sure was right at the time. I built the business case for the investment — I had a picture in my mind of how this investment would pay big dividends and create substantial value. I honed my talking points in every discussion. And I unwittingly leveraged my authority to bias and broadcast to others around me.
It turned out to be a bad decision.
If only I had been able to save myself from myself.
How to Embrace Complex and Ambiguous Decisions
Since that decision, I’ve reconciled that good did come from it, and it’s true that you have to fail to grow. Having said that, I’d like to mitigate other bad decisions in the future! So, I’ve studied the art of decision-making and have found several tools to not only make better decisions but also connect and influence others more effectively.
Consider these five approaches to making complex or ambiguous decisions:
- Leverage proven mental models. Mental models frame better thinking. Shane Parrish, writer of the Farnam Street Blog, describes several mental models here, such as asking, “And then what?” to understand second-order consequences, or mentally taking other positions from your own and asking, “What would that position be optimizing for?”
- Establish weighted criteria. I learned in a Dale Carnegie leadership program for managers to create a list of absolute and desirable criteria (like budget, safety, regulatory constraints, alignment to values, etc.) to evaluate the decision. Then, determine a relative numerical weighting for each criterion as to its importance in the decision. This can either be used to score one decision or, even better, compare alternatives. Just the process of developing criteria helps frame the decision.
- Gain honest input from others. Someone once said that the one thing a person can’t do, no matter how brilliant they are, is make a list of things they can’t think of. That’s why you have to welcome other voices into the decision. Sometimes this can work through reading, podcasts, or conferences, though nothing beats people who are willing to talk back to you in productive and helpful ways.
- Resist the temptation to make it binary. In his book The 3rd Alternative, Stephen R. Covey says that we should always try to open our minds to new options not yet on the table. Likewise, Paul Nutt in his book Why Decisions Fail, suggests changing “whether or not” decisions to “which one.” Exploring multiple options opens creative possibilities.
- Make multiple future predictions. In “Farsighted: How We Make the Decisions that Matter Most,” Steven Johnson advises telling multiple stories to challenge your default predictions. Tell one story where things get better, one where it gets worse, and one where it gets weird. The “weird” prediction, in particular, will elicit more creative thinking about what might be at stake. He compares this approach to Google’s self-driving cars that are designed to continuously evaluate the probability of multiple scenarios based on risk level and catastrophic downside.
Do you have a decision that you’re facing now? Which of these five approaches to decision-making would help you better embrace and make complex or ambiguous decisions?
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